Changes coming to WotC Community Team

[mudbunny]

Merb. Must be some modern, knockable kind of cubicle wall. At Intel, the cubicle walls were steel-and-plastic frames covered with cloth -- but mostly cloth, so you couldn't knock on them.

Ain't progress wonderful? Now we get cubicle walls you can actually knock on, if you wood. (Or "would.")

Probably the cloth ones, from what I can tell of the videos they have posted, but you can still knock on the metal frames.

In any case, to attempt again to get this back on topic*, while Trevor was never the most active person on the forums, 99% of the information that I leaked was him letting me know I could, and a lot of his time was spent trying to get more information out of WotC. The columns Rule of 3 and Mike's column (the name escapes me for the moment) are a direct result of Trevor working hard to get more information and communication out of WotC to the fans.

* When there are at least 2 other threads on the MB, DDI and peoples opinions on how WotC has been doing, I would like to please ask people to not turn this thread into a third.

 

[SSquirrel]

More power to him. He's moving to IOWA! I lived out there for 10 years and it was pretty dull overall. I believe the University of Iowa in Iowa City has a good medical program, but he could also be ending up in Ames or Des Moines, at least I would assume as those are the other 2 main cities in the state. The Iowa City/Cedar Rapids area does have some gaming to be found, but all the dedicated stores had mostly dried up by the time I left in 2007. The best selection in town was actually a place that sold science kits and puzzles and model race cars and then had a massive RPG section to boot heh.

Best of luck in Iowa to Trevor and hopefully some good gaming. BTW Trevor, if you end up in the Iowa City area, DrSpunj here on ENWorld lives in North Liberty and might be looking for a gamer

 

[TirionAnthion]

Iowa

Hey, Iowa is not dull...

Ok, I couldn't even type that with a straight face. Still, I work at a great store in Des Moines called Mayhem Comics <shameless plug>. Not sure what the Iowa City scene looks like but I know that they have a couple of stores in the area. We have a pretty good gaming scene in Des Moines though, so I would encourage Trevor, or anyone passing through, to stop by and check it out.

 

[Bagpuss]

He will still be part of the team, he just won't be managing it, as far as I understand it.

I'm afraid to say it sounds a lot like a when a member of cabinet screws up and they leave to spend more time with their family in their constituency. Might not be the case but that's kind of what it looks like.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Because saying, "Check out our new Monster Builder, coming out on March 22nd, which will allow you to create all new monsters and customize existing ones!"

... and then releasing a Monster Builder that does neither of those things...

... is frustrating to the community, and especially for those who may have signed up for DDI that month specifically in anticipation of the new product.

If they had just explained in advance what they were bringing out and why, there wouldn't be nearly as much anger and frustration over it.

That IS crappy marketing to use that kind of language without at least clarifying that with an asterisk & some fine print.

There's a reason toy companies (and car companies) do that in their ads: they got a LOT of negative press for advertising toys that didn't look like or work as implied in the ads without additional expenditures. In some cases, lawsuits got filed.

It's why organizations like The Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) exist.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Nothin' to say but YAY FOR TREVOR!!!

 

[JoeGKushner]

Yep, although they never should have put that it would allow you to build monsters in the launch announcement.

Bingo. So very simple. If they had launched it with the explanation of what it does instead of talking about what they hope it can do in some Fringe style universe.... "We imagine in the Fringe Universe, even now people are making monsters like crazy! Like crazy!

 

[MrMyth]

That IS crappy marketing to use that kind of language without at least clarifying that with an asterisk & some fine print.

Absolutely. And honestly, I don't think there is anything malicious - or even intentionally deceptive - on WotC's part when they do stuff like this. I think it just is a certain measure of incompetence when it comes to PR and advertisement, and a lack of communication between the various components. The person who wrote that advertisement probably just assumed that the monster builder would have those capabilities at launch, and that the DDI staff really wanted to hype their cool new release. The DDI staff, meanwhile, was way too busy trying to actually get all of the new programs functioning, and didn't notice the snafu until after the fact.

At least, so my speculation goes. I'm sure there is fault in there somewhere. Someone should be really coordinating all these different components - maybe Bill Slavicsek, who is infamous for how terrible he is at honestly communicating with the gaming audience. Maybe Trevor, who is (was) the community director - but who it also sounded like was also tied closely to DDI, and probably busy helping with that.

Honestly, I don't know. I'd like to think that they will learn from this and improve communication going forward - that's the pledge that has been given, and it would be nice to see. But it is also something they've said before, and we still run into problems like this. So I suppose all we can do is wait and see how it plays out from here.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The person who wrote that advertisement probably just assumed that the monster builder would have those capabilities at launch, and that the DDI staff really wanted to hype their cool new release.

Given the way things usually get screwed up that way, the writer was probably told it would have those capabilities. When it was decided to release it without that functionality, nobody ran it back past the writer(s) for revision...intentionally if you believe they're being manipulative, accidentally if you think they're merely incompetent.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Of course, another way to look at it is that WotC continues to do this "crappy marketing" because it doesn't actually hurt them. For all we know... the only people who get all pissy about it are us messageboard people who have nothing better to do that go over every single thing WotC does and says with a fine-toothed comb to find any little thing to blow out of proportion and rant about. And if we forum-folk only make up 2% of their gaming audience, and the other 98% go through their day-to-day DDI lives not caring one way or the other, still subscribing, still using the tools, still being active DDI users... they've determined that our incessant complaints cause little to no appreciable difference and our long internet threads are nothing more than white noise.

Now sure, we'd all like to THINK that us ENWorld forum people have more of an impact on the game and the company... but perhaps we're just fooling ourselves a little bit in that regard? I dunno how true or not true this might be... but it could certainly explain away why WotC still puts out press releases that don't explain what the products actually do to a T.